Health Promotion aims to engage and empower individuals and communities to choose healthy behaviours, and make lifestyle changes that reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases and other morbidities. It combines health education with behaviour change support and enables people to increase control and participate in decision making to improve their health.
SIS Service Users are among a demographic of people who suffer from the greatest health inequalities. Language and cultural barriers make it difficult for them to find and use information about their health in a format that is easily understood. It is also challenging to get access to appropriate support for behaviour change.
SIS uses our language specific website pages and Facebook pages to share translated information with our Service Users, about local and national public services, healthy living initiatives, physical and mental health conditions, and other wider determinants of health.
SIS offers consultation support to NHS and Local Authorities about the best ways to promote public health initiatives and campaigns. We provide advice and insight about which languages to include, what to translate, how to share information directly with Service Users and how to make community events accessible to people with language needs.
We can send relevant, targeted, first language SMS messages directly to Service Users along with links to translated information hosted in the SIS website resource libraries.
You can read about examples of our work supporting public health campaigns here:
We have made videos in different languages to inform people about local services:
SIS can also help with community events where linguists can support engagement and inclusion:
Together at the Community “Souk”
Empowering Women Through Language Access
These methodologies were developed during the Bilingual Health Promotion Project commissioned by NHS Sussex ICB 2021-23. It comprised of six interconnected workstreams combining elements of community development, partnership working and volunteer management to deliver health promotion, social prescribing and community engagement.
